Category: Tech

I just thought of an algebraic suggestion to extend the domain of traditional money with the use of crypto currency.

How about we make a new currency: ComplexCoin! Its value would be like a combination of a major FIAT currency as the real value (💶) and a major crypto coin (👾) as the imaginary value. (Don’t get offended if you are a crypto enthusiast; There’s nothing more real about real numbers compared to the imaginary ones. Afterall these are concpets that mathematicians use to model and conomists can follow too.)

To use the ComplexCoin (i-Coin?) we need to make new pricing models in especial online or brick and mortar stores that sell stuff at complex prices. The pricing is stable because it shall be regulated to depend only on the complex cost of producing or acquiring the goods, and not the volatile exchange rate between the two types of currencies.

So if you have an A+Bi amount of cash in your bank account and you want to buy an item at the complex price of a+bi your account will be charged so you are left with (A-a)i+(B-b) i-Coins. As simple as that.

What matters is that the price of the goods are set by the manufacturer/distributer based only upon the complex cost of the items, all the way from mining and production to wholesale and retail.

This is meant to keep the rates more stable to help adopting cryptocurrencies in our daily lives, so it is important that at the event of purchase the exchange between the real and imaginary values shouldn’t be permitted. Of course people can in their digital bank accounts exchange between the two currencies if exchange rates are unstable.

For example, if an apple (🍎) cost a farmer 1£ and 1 Ripple they typically sell it to the wholesalers with a certain profit(say 100% would make it 2£ and 2Ripples). But even if 1 Ripple is 1£ at the time of purchase, the terminal can not charge 4£, or 4 Ripples, altough they are equal at the time of the transaction.

There can be exceptions where the terminals charges you one of the currencies when the buyer runs out of the other one, for the transaction to go through after prompting.

Also when a transaction fee is applied (purchasing abroad or cashing out at ATM), it can be charged not as a percentage of the magnitude (as it is already the case for our real-axis FIAT currencies), but instead as an angular rotation that will be profitable for the cash terminal, based on the current exchange rate between the two axes.

* * *

There may be a lot of problems and challanges for this to work obviously, but it was worth sharing. At worst, think of it as yet another coin, which creates its niche to stand out by the use of a mathematical concept instead of breeding kitties!

I just wonder if people are going to buy shares in a bank that issues this token, would that be an ICO? IPO? (i-CO or ICPO?)

My flight is taking off now and no Internet on-board this time. I shared my idea. Share your opinions here!

This made me confess that, honestly, it’s been a while since I accepted (or forced myself to believe) that – just like you – I am being watched.

Not only by some unknown pairs of eyes sitting at NSA envying Snowden for his courage, but also by my grand children – already! – having fun in an extrapolated virtual reality of my life in data-archeological musuems of the future (if my boring practices interests any of them at all).

That’s why I find myself at ease assuming that we are at different simulations at the same time. The human park owner of the future, the alien simulator, God and the big brother are all staring at you.

It’s a human specific language for the short-term dominance of this very species; a subjective and relative cultural viewpoint; a man-made phenomenon not only sensitive to geography and demography of its producers, but fundamentally relying on our specific physiological features.

Science is a random walk of accumulated literature largely indifferent to the reality; a set of self-reinforced terminologies that has hypnotised our collective mind.

Science is one in many possibilities that turned out to be the dominant widespread culture of our time due to a series of thrown dice with similar dynamics as rock pigeons colonized the urban landscape worldwide.

So if you take all of it too seriously you may as well think of a pterodactyl as the superior form of a flying object; the shape of a moldy bread as the most genuine form of the truth, or the last check-mate snapshot of a mediocre chess game as the ultimate possibility of a chess board.

We pitched our HappIt app at Disrupt London 2014 and it didn’t take off. Our submission was immature and so was the tech savvy hackathon to understand some of its ellaborated features. It used facial expressions instead of text, had a social element to encourage emotional data logging, and used five-dimensional motion charts for visualization of historic emotions.

Two years later, same event, same city and eventually tech realizes the value of an independent platform dedicated to emotional data collection and analysis. Congratulation to Emotion Journal for wining the Disrupt London 2016 hackathon grand prize. It is a victory for promoting genuine psychometry in tech and they did it with a one-diensional donut chart!

Now the tricky discussion is always around the data collection medium. How do you fish for emotional data? How do you ask people how they feel?

This team has an implicit approach based on natural language processing. First a speech recognition module and then a sentiment analysis algorithm.

The catch is that the phonetic language did not evolve to capture or communicate human emotions at the first place. We had faces to do that. Double-articulated language evolved partly to fake those feelings even.

Right now as you read this, even if you knew me very well, you have no clue whether I write this in a state of happiness, jealousy, dissapointment, hope, anger, shame or pride and now by lining up these keywords I have made it even harder for the sentiment analysis algorithm to capture my real feelings. Technical challanges of parsing such as negation handling and so forth are not the main problems in this area.

I’d argue that facial expression is a better alternative to capture emotions, whether an implicit analysis of an actual selfie, or an explicit drawing of a simple emoticon on a smart watch in a crowded subway.

But of course a hybrid approach combining insights from all different channels (and for example taking voice intonations into account), would be ideal. Until that day, one thing I agree here the way they said it:

“If you do it once a day you can see a visual representation of your feelings and experiences over time.”

So, whichever future app you will use to log your emotions, remember to “happ” it!

I find it worth listening to the futuristic people of the past. These are the visionary breed who see the future better than us. Now while their futuristic stories are sometimes our trivial past, it could as well be our unforeseen future!

There’s something about their way of observing the world that makes their ideas more resilient against the test of time. Those ideas die out with a different time constant than the normal so they will eventually win over the temporary opinions of the habitual daily routines, the temporary, the mortal.

At a penetration rate of perhaps less than 1% of its current rate, the rise of the Internet is referred here as an example for “the emergence of the transcendental object”.

Mckenna foresees the rise of the citizen press, new media and grassroot journalism before the creation of mainstream blogging or digital social networking services. He ellaborates so beautifully on the social aspects of the digital disruption before the rise of new business models powered by the Internet. He has great especulations on the future of augmented reality and in other sources he had predicts the rise of data science. And he spells the long-tail theory, what Chris Anderson and other visionary entrepreneurs of the Sillicon Valley started branding 10 years later (half way between this interview and us). Fun to notice that some predictions of the long-tail theory have already failed, while Mckenna’s ideas are still – mostly – valid. And last but not the least his deep insights on the “technological singularity” and the implications of extrapolating the Moore’s [and similar] laws and the take over of AI, are neater than what people like Kurzweil did, trying to coin the term to their names.

And the striking fact is that McKenna has done the same thing in several other fields, epigenetics, linguistics, anthropology and sociology. Pretty much anything that he has been queried by his audience after he was back from the woods to give talks on his new insights.

This is the power that you get when you leave the civilization and observe merely plants for a couple of decades away from an urban settings. Some turn into Charles Darwin. Some turn into Terence Mckenna. I am very excited to have found this profile. And now if you don’t find this interesting, go ahead keep reading the morning news, the scientific paper right in front of you, or the manual of your vacuum cleaner.

P.S.1. the content of your sweeper’s manual may be still valid in 20 years, so I take that one back!

P.S.2. Many futuristic attempts fail to understand the importance of that “meme time constant”. As an example, in the expensive Hollywood sci-fi projects we see that long-term trends are masked by temporary hypes. If a movie is made today to depict 2040 you see they introduce spaceships and flying cars too early, next to the to-be-extincted numerical keypads (too late). But not even a vintage radio is seen in the scenery. In a futuristic depiction I find it unrealistic not to present the past’s profound achievements in retro style. I however understand that not many others find it as silly, just yet.

Technology is a great thing [for us humans], but it has a negative aspect not many talk about.

It deprives us from feeling the “real experience” in accordance to how we are biologically wired. Technology builds a protective bubble around the human body that however takes care of a lot of challenges for us, leaves us peculiarly unchallanged inside. And to elaborate a bit more on the “challange of unchallended”, it unemploys and unsues the sensorimotor circuitry in our pre-historic brains. And since we percieve happiness more directly inside our brains than on the surface of our skin or outside our bodies, this can be enough to spoil a good deal of fun for us.

In many cases technology offers the same functionality for our survival needs, but with less substance. Same outcome, less work for it. But what if “working for it” was a part of the satisfaction, that was planted in us by evolution to keep us motivated to persue tasks vital for our survival?

The main reason we have brains is sensorimotor circuitry. Some researchers claim it is the only reason. As organisms we need to act upon the world for our survival (the motor system) and in order to do that correctly we need to sense it by a sensory system. So the motor act is the primary goal and the sensory is secondary; it is needed only for the motor act to be decided correctly. Nature doesn’t care if you observe the details of the environment perfectly. Your gene code is passed on if you survive.

Now the technology sits in the way by enhancing the sensory channel and empowering the motor act. It eases the deeply emotional process of decision making, and by doing so leaves those circuitry unused and unemployed. But hasn this not made us unhappy? I used to think that technology enhances feelings and emotions since it assists and magnifies the sensory channel but at our core we are not passive sensors. We are active performers of our lives and spoiled in the comfort of our civilization we have truly lost our natural reference of comparison to our bodily similar ancestors. Lots of process that used to happen in our brains now takes place outside our bodies. Most of the signals that we used to constantly process and handle for survival does not reach the surface of our skins or don’t come even close to us. People go to the nature or gym, try extreme sports or play video games to experience those situations and trigger those condditions; It is a retro movement.

We have all heard modern-time complains about how people nowadays use digital messages instead of real ink on paper postcards, navigate the reality with GPS, and now get dates from apps without holding face-to-face conversations. The outcome is the same; conveying the message, mating or reprodution, or getting to a destination. But something is missing during the process.

Now, this familiar contemporary observations may be worrisome, but it is nothing new.

The technological dumb-down of mankind even if admitted is usually associated to the modern times. This seems to be a new trend in a couple of generations, if we take our own norms and typical lifestyles as the ultimate base for the real experience. Much of “the real experience” had already been taken away from us and before that from our ancestors for dozens of millenia:

* People express worry these days that driving skills, the real experience of navigating the roads is going to fade away with self-driving cars. But do we remember how horse riding felt before cars? Or did our horse-rider ancestors know what they were missing not to hunt an animal while running after it, barefoot?

* Spending too much time in the digital conversations and dealing with only letters and emojis makes us deaf to the intonations of the spoken language. The ability to grasp the meanings conveyed in the rise and fall of the pitch and loudness of the speech needs to be practiced. But was it not the verbal language itself that provided a parallel channel of communication and made us blind to the previous forms of communication, such as reading of emtions from facial expressions? How often do we even try to read each other’s eyes nowadays? In such intuitive social skills that were vital for tribal survival, our illiterate ancestors were more intelligent than us.

* Youth nowadays get dates for their digital profiles sometimes without composing a sentence, or having to make a face-to-face charm. An Irish man in Trondheim told me once “There was a time that people couldn’t hide behind dating profiles. You had to show up in person in real places and talk to real people and prove yourself”. As if a bar is a gladiator arena, or the spoken language itself, just like dating profiles, is not used for people to hide behind. This complain is sound but to me sounds like we would complain to our grand children: “There was a time that you couldn’t just telepathically go through a hundred thousand profiles with the chip in your brain to get a mutual date. You actually had to open an app, a real app! And had to go through profiles one by one. And you had to chat with them, for real. Like composing sentences word by word to make a connection. And then there was still a high chance that they wouldn’t match you because it was not pre-calculated!”

Much of our sensorimotor circuits are inactive since their function is outsourced to the technology. And I think that comes in an order. First the motor act, the outcome of the whole process gets outsourced and inactive, since the machinary around us does it on our behalf. Then there’s no longer need for the sensory part and so that part gets dull and dormant too.

Your worry may be right. The new generation gets spoiled by the new technology and loses the real feel of an experience. They are handed in something as functional but less sensational; less powerful, engaging, and real. Just like we were.

I could write this in a thousand and one narratives, but tonight is the “merger” narrative. This is because this week two telecom giants merged together. Another merger, indifferent from anybody’s struggle to stop them.

This time 85 billion dollars. Let this number sink in a bit and then try to see the pattern here. You have seen it if you follow the global business news regularly:

Mergers are getting more and more frequent.

The acquisition prices get exponentially higher.

The industries involved get more diverse, which means more aspects of our lives is going under monopoly.

The rules that used to control and stop the mergers and guarrantee a minimal competition keep getting weaker by corporate lobbyists and bribed politicians.

What do we expect from these dynamics? They will slowly kill the competition and change our norms and habits. The pace of changing our internal habbits like the external environmental changes are not fast enough to be seen by the naked eye. It’s like staring at the hour hand of the clock; A 100x time-lapse can reveal it. Actually that was a while ago. We are talking about undergoing an exponential change so a 10x time-lapse is enough to make it visible for us, what change is happening around, and inside us.

But we are extremely adaptive creatures. We collectively conform to the norms around us and if they change, we change with them. What mergers do with those norms, is that when they get enormous enough to take over a whole industry at a globel scale, they kill the competition and unify the decision making between previously copeting entities. If one of the giants starts poisoning you, the other one will make a scandal out of it. But not if both are controlled behind the same dashboard. Can we comprehend the dangers here?

Megamergers are slowly changing our lifestyles, the food we eat and what it contains, the information we get, the politicians that rule us, everything! They can already predict and influence some of the decisions we collectively make and they won’t let you notice it. They think in statistics and you are just data points in their analysis. It is not even a month passed from Monsanto/Bayer merger that broke the historic world record of acquisitions at an stonning price of $65B, that this one silently came along with $85B. Can we extrapolate such an exponential growth and see what is waiting for us? Should we be suprised in three years witnessing a half a trillion dollars merger between an already merged food/retail company and another giant social network/media multinational corporate?

Let us fast forward this, fellow frogs:

Fighting cancer gets harder when it passes a certain level. Confronting mergers is increasingly harder when they get to such an gigantic size. Still, we may have a chance to bleck them now or regulate them more by antitrust regulators, but if we keep failing and wait longer, there comes a point that we cannot change the irreversible. That day we will see more clearly what is going to happen, but we will not have the power to stop it.

If things go as they are, in the course of decades if not years, the whole civilization as we know it will be acquired by one (not two) multi trillion dollar super-company or the coalition of multinational corpotations. Then their ultimate board does whatever they want with us data points. And they will have the means to do that, because we will be totally numb by then.

Did you actually follow me this far? Most people typically fail to care to this depth since they are already numb.

But you know that I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. Right? When I say “the board” I don’t mean the mysterious bad guys who are sitting and plotting the apocalypse right now. Or whatever Illuminati. Don’t buy into those naive theories. Conspiracy theories, most of them, are for the kind hearts and simple minds.

Nature is not designed. It is organized on its own, based on simple rules. And it repeats the same patterns over and over. Nature is full of collapses and Doomdays and apocalyptic events. Big and small in all scales. These collapses are smaller babies of the big bang, only reversed:

Reversed in the sense that more and more things will happen in shorter and shorter times!

Our apocalypse will have many faces. “The merger” is one of those one thousand and one faces. The merger is a “winner take all” game. It is a race and we are all in it, but we don’t know who will win, however, there will be a winner. And many many losers. No one can predict who eats whom at the end of the game, but that will eventually turn out. And everyone will be surprised.

Even the people who may think they are conspirist themselves. Even those who think they are the bad guys.

There is a power above us all; It’s cancer. It’s nature. It’s evolution.

I haven’t spoiled the movie for you yet, and I guarrantee it will be full of surprises that none of us can foresee.

I think this is worth a 100$, but only if it works the way I want it to:
I need an “Esc” button to set my life free from any company that has grown bigger than a certain size and that can control my habbits, decisions and lifestyle, and shows tendency to do so, and to use controlling me as a customer to grow even bigger.

I am happy with the already purchased MacBook, although it was a forced choice in the absence of a true competition and among non-existing alternatives previously killed by giants like Apple.

But instead I will not check my Facebook feed today (Apple and Facebook are both in the range of 100 billion to one Trillion dollars worth companies).

P.S. Since this is copied from Facebook: Facebook’s AI machines should (if they already don’t) identify this post as not in line with the company’s profits and adjust the parameters to limit its spread. Next, they should discover obvious patterns of some million profiles like mine, that [for some unimportant reasons] do not contribute to the companies metrics which are supposed to drive profit fot them. So they should start adding us to a dynamic blacklist until we come back normal and contribute to those short-term metrics again.

Imagine this hypothetical landscape: You live in 2300. Humanity is still around and somehow through calculated global programs, colonizing mars or deadly wars has reduced its earth population from ten down to three billion already. And has fixed it there. The earth is tolerably warm but sustained.

Politics:

Countries are provinces of the world federal government and they have different state rules to practice their local cultural differences.
Different races campaign politically to defend the continuation of their gene traits and complaining about the others reproducing more than regulated.
The word “freedom” has mixed meanings and is used with the word “from” not to be misunderstood.

Economy:

There is no centralized money and even digital currency is just a hidden layer of the world economy that some expert may still look at.
People use public services more than their private properties, however that’s a cultural thing; Everyone is given a minimum of private ownership by birth, and several times during their life span. People can lose their private stuff accidentally or choose to donate it at will, however the world welfare system may restore it for them.

There is a notion of money, but that is negative (like debt) which is calculated by an individual’s cost of living such as their footprint as long as it is calculably affected by their personal choices.
Therefore there is no money. There is fine.

Business:

Growth of companies are limited through regulating their shareholder’s wealth. New-capitalism is practiced safely.
Work is constitutional right but voluntary and companies act more like temporary social games shaped by entrepreneurs and closed and cashed out once they serve their purpose. Land and land resources, infrastructure, utilities, transport and media belong to the public and can not be bought by companies or other legal entities by the world constitution.

Every citizen is granted an equivalent of some work/office space and work equipment after a certain age. They can use the equivalent of their office space for individual business or they can exchange it with an equivalent of that when they get a job or build a company.
Education is too a constitutional right and voluntary. People get educated to fit the available work opportunities. Public education is accessible globally and private education is the service that educational companies serve.

Democracy:

Terms above are regulated by the world federal government, which is a distributed post-digital consensus system on the Internet. Democracy is not a hard-coded system and is a complicated structure for collective decision making by humans (and partly even by pets and rightful animals). It senses and collects data from different levels of humans’ lives and aggregate it organically to sense what people want (implicit voting) and thus regulates the society democratically. It’s optimisation will be focused on human’s psychological level and it’s well being. Feeling good is a constitutional right. Citizens get notified about the important updates of their local or federal rules depending on importance and relevance to their lives, and can always overwrite their predicted vote or temporarily exit the decision-making networks voluntarily. Politicians, lawyers and developers aid the machine. General assemblies are held by politicians who are themselves through the machine. Newer versions of democracies are be deployed. All citizens of the world have constitutional right to access the overall simulations and predictions that the system provide based upon the latest rules. Cultural differences will be shaped by local rules decided by the local people at the time. Climate, genetic differences and culture will self-organise the world to a peaceful multicultural equilibrium.

Legal system:

Over-scaling is a unified crime. Occupying other’s territories, violence, killing of rightful beings, exceeding the individual footprint limit, are all forms of over-scaling and will be fined by custody or private property depending on the degree of crime. People scale for sport in the virtual world.

Celebrities:

Plato, Darwin and Mandelbrot are more famous than Einstein. Few nerds know Obama. No body knows Kanye West. But there’s this terrible dancing monkey all over the fucking virtual world.

Other species:

People talk to pets through chips and devices. Eating animals (and humans!) is highly regulated and lab-grown meat (and a lot of other lab food) has taken off. People consume them according to their fashion, taste and lifestyle.

Animals or humans are not being slaughtered in the real world unless there is a legal warrant or a specific type of digital authorization signed for it. Of course people (and pets) still cheat when you don’t see them, but machines watch, warn and stop the cheaters who kill “rightful animals” illegally. There are debates around the definition of that term. Say there is a list including mammals and big land animals. There are debates and protests to include or exclude a certain species.

In Spain (or north Africa?) they still chase bulls in a safer and non-fatal form of bullfighting. And those who love fishing have to go to, let’s say china, because it’s still legal there.

Parenthood:

There are still families, although people are free to live in different social settings and move on to new groups. This will be reinforced by cultural differences in each region and the cultural differences will be maintained.

Psychology:

People take things for granted. They are civilized and they behave but they can easily get depressed and die a fragile life if they get isolated. It’s called “laziside”.
People have become even lazier than us in a sense that they have outsourced their surviving “actions” to the technology and thus they have also outsourced many of their “sensations” because keeping them is not crucial. Shortly, many sensorimotor functions of the brain are practically outsourced to the machines and that’s worrisome due to the depression and numbness that it creates.

Sport:

For the reason mentioned above, “nature gyms” are all around and somewhat mandatory to train people to practice their sensations in the absence of some practical technologies. Professional sports have become intellectual. People compete over their “nature gym” skills by using their physical, social and cognitive skills to show off that they are best. There are cognitive games in the “nature gyms” where people look into each other’s eyes to read feelings and stuff like that. Sex comes to sport with different forms of convertors.

Architecture:

Nature and civilization are mixed up technologically. Buildings breathe and cities are self-sustained. Rooms rotate and change size and adapt with the light conditions democratically by the wishes of people in them.

The list goes on.

A future landscape that is missing a lot of unimaginable technological advances or their cultural artefacts. Just one in a zillion possibilities. Just fantasize and expand it on your own vision.

Then, question:

Is it fun? Should we start talking about a scenery like this? If yes, should we discuss how we should act accordingly to move towards something like this? And not further away from it? Should we wait till machines do it for us?

Here it comes a call for addressing an unpleasant need. A need for recognizing a broader definition of some modern and civilized traits of psychopathy that will functionally include every one of us. A hidden angle of our truth that we need to face and recognize, as this can be the main cause behind the biggest problems that our world faces today.

A phrase from hell: At any cost

A simple mechanisms has become the fuel for our capitalistic growth and the driving force of our technology: Boards of corporations are pressured by shareholders to make decisions as quick as possible to deliver profit at any cost.

The profit is measured by money, a totally fake entity, and that is not where the problem lies. If it was, would be totally fine to play around with a fake thing that does not pose a danger. That would be as harmless as playing a video game.

The problem lies in those three words: “At any cost”. A capitalistic mantra that is designed to exclude all the affected “unavluable things” that can suffer as the byproduct of our value maximization. Wherever this term appears it could be replaced by longer phrases, articles and albeit books if we had decided to ellaborate on that. As a result of every single act of our value maximization, lives and feelings of many beings are fractally at stake. Our capitalistic ideology can not afford such uninmportant semiology, thus it refers them to hell; at any cost.

A conventional psychopath has a “good story”

Psychopaths are portrayed by public as ruttless killers with ugly faces and creepy eyes.

Conventional psychopaths, activated or not are just people with relatively smaller or less active amygdala (the so-called empathy center of the brain). Biologically they are hunters or parasites fighting for their own survival, only that their victim can easily be another human from a close social proximity, aka a “tribe”.

A killer, raper or torturer will not acquire that title until they fit in the same pictured frame or same short story, together with their human pray/victim. A conventional psychopath gets detected and makes newspaper headlines only when their crime have a short and comprehensible story for our simple minds, carried on our primal brains.

We will not understand that an abusive tie between two humans exists or hurts, until it can form a comprehensible story and touches the limited range of our human emotions.

This will strike us to know that a shareholder or consumer of an irresonsible business and the victim of that business can easily be two people in a one-way and abusive bond or relation unknown to both sides. And sadly even more so unknown to the abuser than to the victim. Somtimes the victims get to understand who is running over them before the abuser starts to care.

Forget other species, only between the humans functionally psychopathic bonds are much more common and statistically widespread than urban instances of anti-social crime that make headlines in the media and spark national outrages. You don’t know them because they lack a comprehensible narrative, a “good story”.

As a shareholder or a consumer of an unethical business that delivers profit at any cost, we may already be remote psychopaths with effects worse than the movie characters in slaughterhauses, as we are living off harming many other victims. Only that the prays are not close members of our tribe. We just don’t know or see them.

We need a more general and philosophical definition of “psychopathy” beyond the conventional psychiatric terminology that limits that concept to just an anti-social disorder.

We need that broader definition of psychopathy to see and understand what our increasingly powerful collective civilization is doing to the world and ultimately to ourselves.

We need that for the survival of our species.

Greed before empathy, A recipe for extinction

With power comes responsibity. Why? For survival.

Now imagine tribal/local empathy with global influence.

Do you know how to wipe out a species from inside? Empower their individuals, without accordingly granting them an increased level of empathy. Their equilburium will collapse and they will harm each other to ultimate extinction.

Capitalism is the last instrument that we have used to follow up with this recipe.
Capitalism increases the range of our individual power much faster than ever before, while not helping our empathy circle growing any bigger. As the workers of the capitalistic machine we are not supposed to feel that something is wrong as long as we are functional.

Our global influence is in action to harm many other beings, while our tribal empathy is fairly satisfied inside our own social bubble. That is why we naturally feel fine and follow the system until a danger comes to our visibility and touches our basic emotions and stimulates our rather weak empathy that is much smaller now than it should be with respect to our power.

Our empathy is tribally limited

Human society was during its longest history of evolution a scattered group of isolated homo tribes. Reletively recently our society has scaled up to have become this huge interconnected network. Still at every point and at each individual it is just a local tribe. And each of us is just a naked ape with a primal brain that hasn’t evolved according to the fast pace that it has created in its environment.

We are still naked apes playing around and messing with the nature with technological tools. We are equipped with things that we don’t understand although we have collectively made them. As individuals we still run around with our ancient brains that doesn’t seem to have added many brain circuits to that of our prehistoric ancestors. And particularly to their amygdala.

The empathy mechanisms in that brain has evolved slowly as social mechanisms of control, to assure the survival only in a tribal level. As for most of our evolution our behavior could influence things only within that limited social structure.

We have no care or attention whatsoever, towards the creatures outside our social proximity. This made us a regular animal in the nature, until our power surpassed the borders of our fine-tuned empathy and reached beyond our tribe. Ever since we have been blindly increasing the territory of our influence faster than the territory of our affective understanding and in an ever acllerating pace.

The modern interconnected world has stretched our influence way beyond the visible range of our cognition, let alone the much narrower circle of our affective empathy. We have no care or attention whatsoever towards those who get trapped outside our narrow empathy circle, let alone the affected beings completely outside our visible zone.

All you need to do is to ask yourself this one question: How many people (let alone other beings) you harm during our lives, without seeing or registering them?

We are much moer terrible than what we want to believe we are.

We need functional empathy

To systematically neutralize our “functional psychopathy” and reverse some of its harms we need to invent “functional empathy”. Our natural empathy is way too limited to carry such burden.

In order to reduce the unpredictable harms that technology causes to the environment, it should start to feel it to decide whether or not it should change it in that direction.

That one principle with any interpretation, could have saved us from much of our modern problems and could made our growth much more sustainable and genuine. And should become prioritized with something even more aggressive the capitalism itself.

How could we potentially use our technology to “feel” the world is not to be addressed here, but that poses the fundamental question:

How can we care for something that we don’t see?

I will not try to answer this right here. We need to build a paradigm. I will try to throw some ideas later with sparks I see in the world of big data. Empathetic data-driven decision making.